Businesses, particularly those in the knowledge industries have developed a great interest in forming and fostering communities of practice within their organizations as a means of providing a high quality way of getting the work of the company done. Communities of practice provide an effective way of managing organizational knowledge. This phenomenon has been described by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder in their book, Cultivating Communities of Practice, chapter 1, pages 1-21.
Lesser and Prusak also describe this use of communities of practice in their paper, “Communities of Practice, Social Capital and Organizational Knowledge.” They note that organizations have a formal structure often described by an organization chart. But, there are also informal networks of employees, crossing organizational boundaries, who work together to create, share, and apply organizational knowledge.
As used herein, the term community of practice shall be taken to mean as in Lesser and Prusak paper, a collection of individuals bound by informal relationships that share similar work roles and a common context.
Gongla and Rizzuto describe their experience with such communities of practice within a large organization in their paper titled, “Evolving Communities of Practice: IBM Global Services Experience.”
The articles by Gongla and Lesser, as well as pages 1-21 of the book by Wenger, shall be incorporated herein by reference.
With such great interest by business organizations, naturally there is a desire to improve the business' capabilities by using improved methods of developing and sustaining the capabilities of their respective communities of practice. An important element of improved methods in developing and sustaining communities lies in improved methods of measuring or assessing the current capabilities of an existing community. Such an improved measuring method is the subject of the related patent application identified above which shall be incorporated herein by reference. The object of the present invention is directed to methods of improving these capabilities while making use of such improved measurement methods.